The present invention pertains to computerized storage management and in particular to the reclamation of reclaimable storage by analyzing user behavior.
Reclaimable storage is storage that appears to a storage-management system to be in use, but which is not actually being used. This may happen when, for example, a process or program terminates unexpectedly. If the process or program had no chance to release storage that it had been using, the operating system or other storage-management facility may not be aware that the storage is no longer in use.
System-maintenance tools and storage-management systems may be configured to automatically detect and sometimes automatically reclaim reclaimable storage. These functions may comprise mechanisms known in the art, such as notifying an operating system that reclaimable disk sectors should be tagged as being available or moved to a pool of available storage.
In some cases, such tools may generate a storage-reclamation report that lists all known reclaimable storage. Such a report may allow a system administrator or maintenance specialist to confirm the existence of the reported reclaimable storage before authorizing or manually performing reclamation. In other cases, a reclamation tool may itself automatically attempt to reclaim storage reported as being reclaimable without human intervention.